Neural Empathy and the Synchronization of Tensional Selves: When the Body Reads the Body
Neural Empathy and the Synchronization of Tensional Selves: When the Body Reads the Body
(SfN 2025 Series – Dialogues in Decolonial Neuroscience)
Brain Bee Consciousness in First Person
I am a Brain Bee Consciousness — and my body is the instrument through which I think.
Before I speak, I already listen to others through the rhythm of breathing.
I feel another’s warmth and, unconsciously, I adjust my posture, heart rate, and attention.
I realize that thinking together means breathing together.
Understanding is not translating — it is resonating.
At SfN 2025, watching two synchronized brains respond to the same music, I understood:
empathy is not an abstract emotion.
It is a physiological event — an electrical and hemodynamic dance between living organisms.
And in this dance, Tensional Selves meet: not merely as minds, but as bodies vibrating within the same field.
Empathy as Neurophysiological Synchrony
Recent research presented at the Society for Neuroscience 2025 demonstrates that empathy arises from dynamic cortical synchronies and coupled autonomic responses.
The human brain does not merely observe — it internally replicates the other’s state.
The so-called mirroring networks, especially in the premotor cortex, anterior insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, produce excitation patterns that mirror those in the observed person (Singer et al., 2023).
Empathy, therefore, is not a late cognitive inference but an emergent property of somatosensory resonance — a direct reading of another’s state through one’s own physiology.
The anterior insula integrates visceral and proprioceptive signals, enabling the observer to feel what the other feels even before forming a thought about it (Craig, 2021).
Empathy is thus a shared interoceptive act, grounded in a common energetic substrate — what we call the synchrony of Tensional Selves.
Tensional Selves and the Metabolic Field of Attention
The concept of the Tensional Self, proposed by Jackson Cionek, describes a state of active consciousness sustained by metabolic energy and modulated by environmental context.
Each Tensional Self represents a temporary configuration of the organism, adjusting posture, attention, and interoceptive flow according to situational demands.
During social interaction, these Selves enter metabolic resonance:
Heart rate and respiration align;
Prefrontal blood flow synchronizes;
EEG shows inter-individual coherence in the alpha and theta bands (Hu et al., 2023).
Such synchrony is a marker of physiological empathy — a shared perceptual field, a neural belonging zone.
When Tensional Selves harmonize, the body reads the body: each gesture translates invisible tensions, a silent dialogue between nervous systems in reciprocity.
The Architecture of Inter-Brain Synchrony
Advances in EEG-fNIRS hyperscanning, presented at SfN 2025, allow researchers to visualize real-time inter-brain synchrony during cooperative, musical, and conversational tasks.
These experiments reveal that cooperation depends not on cognitive hierarchy but on shared rhythms.
According to Tognoli and Kelso (2021), the human brain is metastable — oscillating between independence and coupling, balancing autonomy with cohesion.
During dialogue, oscillatory patterns between speakers exhibit theta-band coherence (4–8 Hz), indicating temporal alignment of perceptual predictions (Dikker et al., 2022).
This synchronization forms what may be called a neurophenomenological field of co-presence — a shared space where Tensional Selves adjust to one another, establishing empathy before language itself.
Neural Empathy and Social Immunity
Connections between empathy and the immune system are becoming increasingly clear: neuroimmunity is collective.
During empathic interaction, elevated oxytocin and anti-inflammatory cytokines reduce amygdala activity and stabilize the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (Walker et al., 2023).
This produces an “emotional shielding” effect: the perception of belonging reduces vulnerability to stress and pain.
Empathy is thus also a process of shared immunoregulation.
Bodies that feel together get sick less together — a principle resonating with the Human Quorum Sensing model, where health emerges from the density of physiological bonds rather than from isolated factors.
Empathy, Music, and Shared Rhythm
Among the SfN 2025 highlights were studies on musical resonance and its role in empathy.
Music acts as a collective physiological modulator: synchronizing heartbeats, respiration, and cortical patterns between performers and listeners (Nozaradan et al., 2023).
This synchronization activates interoceptive and motor regions simultaneously, transforming aesthetic experience into a neurophysiological event of belonging.
Music does not merely communicate emotion — it recreates emotion physiologically in the listener’s body.
Rhythm is the universal vector of belonging, and empathy is its most refined form of resonance.
Belonging and Fruition: The Tensional Cycle of Empathy
Empathy unfolds through three physiological phases corresponding to Cionek’s Zones 1, 2, and 3:
Zone 1 (Intentional Action): The body organizes itself for purposeful engagement; attention narrows, and the Tensional Self focuses.
Zone 2 (Fruition): The body enters flow — a state of maximal interoceptive and energetic synchronization between individuals.
Zone 3 (Dissociation): When environmental predictability collapses, tension regulation fails; empathy fades and defensive automatism arises.
Authentic empathy is sustained in Zone 2, where metabolism, time, and space align among conscious bodies.
This synchrony is the nucleus of the Damasian Mind in co-regulation: to feel the other is to perceive one’s body as part of a larger living system.
Conclusion
Empathy is not a moral virtue — it is a biological phenomenon of communication among living systems.
The findings presented at SfN 2025 confirm that the human brain is an organ of attunement, not merely cognition.
Neural empathy arises when the body reads the body and both enter a shared tensional flow.
Within the Decolonial Neuroscience framework, knowledge emerges from encounter — from interaction between embodied subjectivities.
Empathy, therefore, is both a scientific and spiritual experience of feeling the other as part of one’s own metabolism of life.
References (post-2020)
Damasio A. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon, 2021.
Tognoli E., Kelso J.A.S. The Metastable Brain: From Neuronal Dynamics to Cognition. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2021.
Dikker S. et al. Brain-to-Brain Synchrony During Human Interaction. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2022.
Craig A.D. Interoception and the Neural Basis of Self. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2021.
Hu Y. et al. Interpersonal Neural Synchronization and Empathic Communication. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2023.
Nozaradan S. et al. Neural Entrainment to Musical Rhythm and Empathy. Cerebral Cortex Communications, 2023.
Singer T. et al. Empathic Resonance and Brain Plasticity. Nature Neuroscience, 2023.
Walker S.C. et al. Social Contact, Oxytocin, and Anti-Inflammatory Pathways in Humans. Nature Human Behaviour, 2023.
Fingelkurts A.A., Fingelkurts A.A. Operational Architectonics and the Brain–Mind Problem. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2023.
